I’m including a sampling of three poems by Nelly Sachs in my course on representations of the holocaust. Here is a link to a PDF copy of these three: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/afilreis/holocaust/Sachs-Nelly_selected-poems.pdf
Visits to the Shoah Memorial, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Place des Vosges—and, later, with Spanish-Parisian poet Irene Torra Mohendano, to the Le104 public/open art center, Canal de l’Ourcq, and a squatter-style poets’ pop-up where we hung out with Colombia poet Jorge Torres Medina.
Terrence Des Pres, of course, was not a survivor of the holocaust. Nonetheless, the Fortunoff Archive of Video Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University sought him out to record his testimony. Here it is: LINK TO VIDEO.
Tomorrow I’ll be watching Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah for the 22nd time. It’s 9.5 hours long. People sometimes watch the film in two sittings. In a way, we dont have time to schedule two different viewing days. But, more, the film’s power is one of a kind of mesmerization. Watching...
The symposium in memoriam Terrence Des Pres at the Kelly Writers House honoredthe 40th anniversary of the publication of his influential study of survivorship and writing (bearing witness), The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976), a major work on Holocaust testimony. Much contemporary scholarly and journalistic...
Today in “Representations of the Holocaust” we discussed Spiegelman’s Maus and were visited by the family of one of the students (including her survivor grandmother) and also by Diane & Jerry Rothenberg. It was an intense session and ended with Jerry’s preface to Khurbn in which he turns around Adorno’s...
Charles Bernstein is back from a trip to Israel & Palestine and we are chatting by email this afternoon (typical of us) and I realized that this overview I did of why I like his “Pitch of Poetry” so much adequately gets to what I love about his anti-anti-intellectual Euromodernist...
Currently David Roberts and I are co-leading an online discussion group. We’re discussing two stories; one is Vladimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” first published in the New York in May of 1948. I believe this is Nabokov’s post-Holocaust story. I asked the group (80 or so people from around the...
When I teach my course on representations of the holocaust, I don’t lecture (for what it’s worth, it’s an ethical stance for me—but that’s for another comment sometime) and I rarely if ever record our sessions. As can be imagined—since, as I say, these are discussions, not lectures—the sessions are intense...
A dear old friend asked me this morning for my opinion on why the so-called “New York intellectuals” under-responded to World War II and to the fate of the Jews in Europe. Here, in part, is how I responded: Some of them (Trilling, obviously) became literary Anglophiles as a means...
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon,
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. His new book is 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (Columbia University Press, 2021). He is currently writing a book about online pedagogy. He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 265,000 participants in 192 countries since 2012.
Founder/Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House—intro video ][ events calendar
Convener/teacher, “ModPo.” an open online course on modern & contemporary U.S. poetry—overview of the course ][ intro video
Publisher of Jacket2 magazine—my Jacket2 commentary series ][ "First Readings"
Producer/host, PoemTalk podcast series—co-sponsored by Kelly Writers House & the Poetry Foundation
Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing—Creative Writing ][ RealArts internships ]
Co-founder & co-director of PennSound—50,000 files ][ 15 million downloads annually
Teacher & host, "Kelly Writers House Fellows"—since 1999 ][ Susan Sontag, John Ashbery, Jamaica Kincaid, Laurie Anderson, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, John Edgar Wideman & more
Teacher, "Representations of the Holocaust"—a course on survivor testimony ][ my holocaust site
Click on the image for information about the book.